Greens rule out joining Sweden's conservative-liberal minority

Sweden's Greens have told the prime minister that they will not work with his
conservative-liberal minority as the country's politicians scramble to try
and keep newly elected far-Right MPs out of the government.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his wife Filippa. Reinfeldt appears to be heading for an historic second termPhoto: AP

By Bruno Waterfield

4:38PM BST 20 Sep 2010

Sweden has now become the third previously stable Western European country since June to be without a governing majority after elections marked by the rise of far-Right, anti-immigrant or separatist parties.

Frederik Reinfeldt, the current Prime Minister, has pleaded for time and help from other mainstream parties to deal with an unprecedented breakdown of the Swedish consensus model of politics.

The Greens along with all other Swedish parties have refused to co-operate with the far-Right but on Monday threw Swedish politics into further disarray by refusing to work with Mr Reinfeldt too.

"We are not going to be a support party to the Alliance," said Maria Wetterstrand, a Green leader.

Mr Reinfeldt's Alliance of four conservative and liberal parties fell three seats short of a historic second term majority in Sunday's election to take 172 seats in the 349 member Riksdag, Sweden's parliament.

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A Left-Green opposition bloc, led by the Social Democrats, who got their worst result since 1914, won 157 seats leaving the parliament without a majority and the far-Right Sweden's Democrats potentially holding the country's government to ransom with 20 MPs.

"We take responsibility based on the election result that we have got. We will do this without using words such as chaos, but with the orderliness that is expected of us," said Mr Reinfeldt yesterday.

Like parties in the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark, Sweden's Democrats, which yesterday boasted of having "written political history", campaigned on an anti-Islam and anti-immigrant platform to win 5.7 per cent of the vote, almost double its result in 2006 elections.

Mr Akesson's party has tapped into growing Swedish resentment at high levels of immigration with campaigning that included a widely shown television broadcast that featured Middle Eastern women in burkas, with their prams, barging frail, white Swedish pensioners out of a queue for welfare benefits.

Sweden has joined a growing list of European countries where nationalist and populist politicians have broken the mould, destabilising governments hit by popular disenchantment and fallout from the global economic crisis.

"Because of the crisis and dearth of jobs politicians are playing on emotions to win votes, looking for scapegoats," said Shada Islam at the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

The Netherlands, another country renowned for its liberalism, has been paralysed since June after Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam politician, came third, denying any centre political party a majority. Next month Mr Wilders is on trial for inciting hatred of Muslims.

In Belgium, also in June, voters overturned all political conventions by giving Flemish separatists, who call for the country to be broken up, the largest share of the vote.

Far-right parties currently are in government in Italy and also sit in the parliaments of Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia and the European Parliament.

"Politics is becoming nationalistic and nativist in many parts of Europe, reflected in an anti-immigrant backlash, Islamophobia, and the rise of extreme right wing parties," said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business.